Posts by Wonderment

332

The most successful teaching of Jehovah's Witnesses and an amazing new book on the divine name

by slimboyfat in

jehovah's witnesses have had to revise their chronology and various doctrinal interpretations due to events and scholarly corrections.

but the one teaching where they have been consistently ahead of the curve is the importance of jehovah's name.. .

i'm going to run through a (necessarily selective) timeline of jw events and scholarly publications that demonstrate the phenomenal success of this teaching in the last days.

Wonderment

I previously said: "Posters like jwfacts and some others want JWs to wither and die. I too believe the JW movement poses enough danger to its followers."
jwfacts´ response: "That's a bit insulting, an ad hominem dismissal of my opinions."

I offer my apology if I came across as insulting. In contrast with some posters who like to offer a lot of rant with no substance, you offer a lot of information as a background for your viewpoints. I agree with a lot of your conclusions, sometimes not.

You mention that JWs strangely use modern dates to show somehow that Jehovah supports their organization (Not quoting verbatim). I agree that such spectacle is weird.

On the name of Jehovah, I agree that a contradiction is made evident when the WT sustains the complete inerrancy of the Word at the same time they claim the Divine Name has been tampered with. Not to mention the conflicting actions of the WT on various issues ranging from Child-abuse to the United Nations debacle.

I may disagree however with the message often communicated (not verbatim) in this forum by various posters - in that the WT has to be wrong on the sole basis they lack scholarship and for holding a minority view against popular doctrines. As Frederick Danker once said after making a favorable comment on the Hebrew portion of the NWT : "We do well to test the spirits."

332

The most successful teaching of Jehovah's Witnesses and an amazing new book on the divine name

by slimboyfat in

jehovah's witnesses have had to revise their chronology and various doctrinal interpretations due to events and scholarly corrections.

but the one teaching where they have been consistently ahead of the curve is the importance of jehovah's name.. .

i'm going to run through a (necessarily selective) timeline of jw events and scholarly publications that demonstrate the phenomenal success of this teaching in the last days.

Wonderment

Slim:

Thanks for bringing your research to the table. I appreciate it.

One fact that seems to go over participants here is that no one knows everything. The matter is not always black and white, 100% right or 100% false. A good number of posters in this site seem to believe JWs are always 100% false, with no chance of getting some things right. At the same time, they seem to believe that Evangelicals are 100% right. It is most likely that mainstream believers and JWs get some things right and many things wrong. We can´t let hate overrule our judgment. So we have to listen, analyze - different viewpoints.

On the divine name, I tend to agree with Slimboy for a few reasons. First, the evidence of the Divine Name appearing in the original NT is getting stronger with passing years. True, the evidence may not amount to the level needed to sway skeptics, but is enough to make a truth-seeker ponder over the issue.

Secondly, writers throughout history generally strive to honor the original content when quoting from them. Scriptures such as Matthew 22:41-45 which speaks of two Lords as we have it today (being a quote) is obscure and make little sense if Jesus is the ONLY Lord of the Universe. If so, why would he be receiving a COMMAND from the first LORD. By the way, the message of that Scripture in Mat. is repeated throughout the NT. Which leads me to believe the first mention of Lord had God´s name in place. Yes, I know that thousands of existing manuscripts don´t show the Divine Name in the NT, other than the abbreviated form at Rev. 19:1. But people overall seem to miss the very important element that they are simply COPIES. A lot could have happened between the original writings and their copies. Like what, you say?

Well, if one were to go over two leading publications that deal with textual-criticism (one by Bruce M. Metzger and the other by Phillip W. Comfort), the careful observer would notice that many of the readings in doubt in the NT deal precisely with the confusion around the identity of God and Christ beginning shortly after the apostles . There was obviously a tug of war between two main factions, one spent trying to elevate Christ to Godś level, and the other one trying to conserve Jewish monotheism at its core. Who won the debate? Apparently those favoring Christ as the replacement of Jehovah, instead of Christ being represented as God´s apostle. (Hebrews 3:1) The Trinity eventually took over the minds of the religious world tainted by Greek philosophy. (John 12:31; 2 Cor. 4:4)

Posters like jwfacts and some others want JWs to wither and die. I too believe the JW movement poses enough danger to its followers. That is why I stopped going to their meetings almost three decades ago. But to conclude that they can´t get anything right begs many a question.

And for those repeating the nonsense that we are not supposed to use the Divine Name because we don´t have the exact pronunciation, why don´t you start using the names of Jesus and other biblical names in this forum as they are believed to be originally pronounced ? Try it, and see how far you can go with this.

21

Updates and fixes

by Simon in

i thought i'd spend some time cleaning up the forum code and wanted to let you know about some of the recent changes and fixes:.

the avatars and in-post images used to use a separate imaging service which was convenient but didn't provide much control over caching which meant that each day you visited the site you were probably re-downloading those images again.

as they are immutable they can be cached for a long time which saves bandwidth and speeds things up.

Wonderment

Thanks cofty for the tip!

21

Updates and fixes

by Simon in

i thought i'd spend some time cleaning up the forum code and wanted to let you know about some of the recent changes and fixes:.

the avatars and in-post images used to use a separate imaging service which was convenient but didn't provide much control over caching which meant that each day you visited the site you were probably re-downloading those images again.

as they are immutable they can be cached for a long time which saves bandwidth and speeds things up.

Wonderment

Thanks for your many efforts in improving this website!

Can we get an option to employ underlines?

16

JW as a secret society - a weak link in the Information Age.

by slimboyfat in

in the late 1990s there was magazine article that asked the question, are jws a secret society?

obviously they said no, because they claim to be transparent to outsiders and new members.

but they really are not transparent at all.

Wonderment

Interesting subject!

The WT Society has to be one of the most (if not the most) secretive organizations on earth.

Somehow, by going secret combined with sleazy shunning practices, they keep most remaining Witnesses in awe of this "wonderful" "divine" organization. As you noted, the Information Age is undoing a lot of their dirty secrets.

When I disassociated from the organization over two decades ago, I kept photocopies of the Elder's book. Just in case. Guess what! Only used it twice to check two relevant organizational procedures in all that time. Now the book is obsolete, useless for the most part.

As an outsider now, I see the whole organization enchilada as a turn-off. Some of those irrational rules are turning more people away in some places that they bring in. The "overlapping generation" concept is an insult to current members.The revised NWT mentions the date 1914 within its pages. Yes! That's irrational! Why keep an unproven chronology date in a Bible that is supposed to be free of religious bias? And so on!

Ludicrous! The WTS needs to get educated people at the top in order to lead uneducated followers below. I feel sorry for those WT writers who have to endure the most dissonance in religious interpretation anywhere.

37

Just realized they changed maybe the most important scripture in the bible.

by Crazyguy in

i just read the scripture then went and checked in thier older bible and it read the same so i check the greek interlinear and yes they changed john 3:16 .

the verse reads "all who believe in him should not perish but have everlasting life" the cult version says "exercising faith in him might not be destroyed but have everlasting life".. so not only do they say one must exercise faith meaning having to work for it but also they changed should not perish but having everlasting life to might not be destroyed again making a caveat where one does not exist.

just to add to the point verse 18 in both bibles says the one having faith is not judged, totally blowing up thier version of 16 but of course they change 18 to say exercising faith too but it makes little difference, since it says not judged.

Wonderment

Half banana:

Martin Luther was wrong! It is perfectly easy to distinguish faith from the works associated with faith. In the absence of other translators rendering the text in question as “exercising faith” as opposed to “believe,” I conclude that in this instance the JW org have doctored the translation to suit their own interests. It thereby becomes a snub to the “just believe in Jesus” movements. JWs very much want to tell you that they have the works to show that they are doing a worldwide preaching work.

I don't think that by Martin Luther saying, "It is impossible, indeed, to separate works from faith" he meant that religious groups ought to emphasize works over faith as a means of acceptance, and to be saved. As a Protestant reformer, Luther held that salvation / eternal life are not earned by good works but are received only as the free gift of God's grace through the believer's faith in Christ Jesus as redeemer from sin. I think his purpose was to advise Christians against a laid back lifestyle, thus he wrote that "faith is not inert."

So I take his comments within the above context. I agree with you that some religious organizations like the WT emphasize their kind of "works" over true Christian faith, which is clearly wrong.

At the other extreme, some Christians seek to stay away from any Christian responsibility from their daily conduct. To prove the WTS wrong, they fall in the trap that all you got to do is simply "believe" intellectually that Jesus is Savior. These individuals may point to Acts 16.31, where Paul and Silas told the jailer, "Believe in the Lord Jesus and you will be saved" when the jailer asked them: ‘What must I do to be saved?’" In the Greek language used here, "believe" appears in aoristic mode (punctiliar action), so many have concluded that for Christian salvation, all one needs to do is ‘acknowledge’ Christ as one's Savior. What they don't realize, is that acknowledging Christ as Savior is the FIRST step one must take in a life-long course of godly worship. One must endure till the end. Otherwise, all those Scriptures extolling endurance and fine Christian living would be empty in meaning.

In John, we are told that one must "believe" (a word related to "faith") that Christ is the Son of God, and God's savior to the world. As noted in my previous post, the word "believe" appears as a present participle with the article (Lit., "the believing into him"), leading scholars to explain here, that "faith is sought of as an activity," especially denoting the exercise of saving faith."

If ‘faith is an activity,’ and one can ‘exercise saving faith,’ at John 3.16, therefore translations that indicate so are not too far from the author's intention in transmitting that Christians must be actively obedient to Christ, fully trusting and relying on Him. "Active faith" is the opposite of "inert faith" which Luther warned us against.

This is not to say that "exercising faith" is the best translation possible of the Greek word at hand, but one must ask why is there so much aversion to the thought of such activity in one's Christian life? Dislike of the WT Society (I am with you there) need not transform into the same dislike for the thought transmitted by a Bible version mentioned on my previous post:

"For God loved the world so much, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whoever has an active faith in him should not perish, but have everlasting life."

37

Just realized they changed maybe the most important scripture in the bible.

by Crazyguy in

i just read the scripture then went and checked in thier older bible and it read the same so i check the greek interlinear and yes they changed john 3:16 .

the verse reads "all who believe in him should not perish but have everlasting life" the cult version says "exercising faith in him might not be destroyed but have everlasting life".. so not only do they say one must exercise faith meaning having to work for it but also they changed should not perish but having everlasting life to might not be destroyed again making a caveat where one does not exist.

just to add to the point verse 18 in both bibles says the one having faith is not judged, totally blowing up thier version of 16 but of course they change 18 to say exercising faith too but it makes little difference, since it says not judged.

Wonderment

steve2 wrote: I do agree that there is nothing in the Koine Greek which supports the NWT translators' rendering of the word "to believe in" as "exercising faith". I wonder: Is there even one other translation in existence besides the NWT that renders the word into an active verb?

Steve: As far as I know, there is no other version which reads exactly as the NWT does in John 3.16. On the other hand, the use of "believing" in the Greek sometimes means a lot more than simply acknowledging a fact, such as ‘Jesus is Savior’ in John 3.16. The context of the verse implies that ‘believing’ requires ‘obedience’ to Christ. The ASV reads at John 3.36: "He that believeth on the Son hath eternal life; but he that obeyeth not the Son shall not see life, but the wrath of God abideth on him." On verse 18 of this chapter,The McArthur Study Bible explains: “The phrase (lit., ‘to believe into the name’ [of v. 18]) means more than mere intellectual assent to the claims of the gospel. It includes trust and commitment to Christ as Lord and Saviour, which results in receiving a new nature (v. 7) that produces a change in heart and obedience to the Lord...” (Sublines added throughout)

Likewise, of the phrase ‘believes... does not believe’ of verse 18, the NIV states: “John is not speaking of momentary beliefs and doubts but of continuing, settled convictions.” And the Recovery Version: “Believing into the Lord is not the same as believing Him (6:30). To believe Him is to believe that He is true and real, but to believe into Him is to receive Him and be united with Him as one. The former [6:30] is to acknowledge a fact objectively; the latter [3:16] is to receive a life subjectively.”

The way the Greek is phrased (Lit., "the believing into him") suggest this. An Introductory Grammar of New Testament Greek, by Paul Kaufman notes: “Another construction which is common in the New Testament (especially in John's Gospel) is πιστεύω [pi·steu'o] with εἰς [eis] and the accusative case [as found at John 3:16] . . . The whole construction of εἰς [eis] plus the accusative must be translated rather than attempting to translate the preposition εἰς [eis] as an isolated word. Faith is thought of as an activity, as something men do, i.e. putting faith into someone. John uses this construction thirty-six (36) times.” (Page 46, Section 93)

So too, Greek Grammar Beyond the Basics says concerning pisteuo (everyone who believes [into]) specifically as found at John 3:16:
"The idea seems to be both gnomic and continual: ‘everyone who continually believes.’ This is not due to the present tense only, but to the use of the present participle of [pisteúo]." (Daniel B. Wallace, Zondervan Publ., 1996, p. 620)

The Analytical Lexicon of the Greek New Testament (pisteúo) adds: “(1) as primarily an intellectual evaluation believe […] (2) as primarily a religious commitment, especially with God or Christ as the object of faith believe (in), trust [...] especially denoting the exercise of saving faith, with the object expressed by using [eis] or [epí] and the accusative, believe in or on (JN 3.16; AC 9.42) […] (3) as committing something to someone entrust, trust (LU 16.11); passive, as having something committed to someone be entrusted with [from pisteúo] (RO 3.2).” (Friberg, Friberg - Miller)

Because of the presence of a present participle in the verse, the Analytical Literal Translation translates: “every [one] believing [or, trusting] in Him” (Brackets his.) So the idea is brought out by the Amplified Bible, Classic Edition: “everyone who believes in Him [who cleaves to Him, trusts Him, and relies on Him].” (Brackets theirs.)

Other versions:

NSB: “that whoever has an active faith in him”

Jonathan Mitchell: “...the one habitually believing and trusting into Him.”

The Simple English Bible: “Every person who commits himself to Jesus will not be destroyed”

Kenneth S. Wuest: “everyone who places his trust in Him”

Martin Luther tells us: "It is impossible, indeed, to separate works from faith, just as it is impossible to separate heat and light from fire. [...] Faith is not an inert thing." (Preface of the Epistle to the Romans as quoted in Martin Luther, selections from his writings, Doubleday Publishing, 1961, pp. 24 & 33).

Thus, the notion of "believing into," "placing trust in," putting faith in," or "exercising faith" in Christ is not incongruous with the gospel message or with Greek usage.

41

Why the Deficit at the Circuit Assembly?

by JT-LadyC in

have you ever wondered why there is always a deficit at the circuit assembly?

did you realize that before the program begins, the circuit is already in the red?

many of the friends thought they were paying for the use of the building and covering the costs of the utilities, etc.

Wonderment

There are two certain things in life: death and taxes.

That's not right! Let me correct that: There are THREE certain things in life:

Death, taxes, and now, deficits in JW circuit assemblies.

24

The official relationship between Jehovahs Witnessses and the Watchtower? I'm confused.

by Joliette in

jw
friends

can anybody answer this for me?.

whenever i tell people i'm ex jehovahs witnesses, they always assume that i'm against the jehovahs witnesses, but i am more so against the watchtower then anything.people assume that i'm anti-jehovahs witness, but now that i've done more research i've realized that its the watchtower thats more harmful then the jehovahs witnesses, even though theres a lot of jehovahs witnesses i dont like, i'm not against jehovahs witnesses as a group.. can anyone explain this to me?.

Wonderment

Joliette: "There's a lot of confusion when it comes to this. I always tell my brother I'm against the watchtower but he thinks I'm against Jehovah."

The WT Society has been very successful in deceiving its followers with the belief that putting your trust in "the faithful and discreet slave" is the same as placing faith in Jehovah. Not true! These two are totally different things.

It is the authoritative and unyielding nature of the WT Society that makes it despicable to all those being victimized by its un-Christian practices.

It is not God's fault that this religious entity does not follow Christian practices as they claim. And the JWs are just gullible victims of the superior cunning of its leaders. They have been blinded by ‘the god of this system of things, so that the illumination of the glorious good news about the Christ...might not shine through.’ (2 Cor 4.4)

Instead of ‘the glorious good news about the Christ shining through’ to them, what they get is ‘the ominous news of the faithful and discreet slave shining through’...that those who independently worship God without them are doomed.

27

I am losing

by NoMoreHustle in

i haven't posted anything for a bit, but wanted to express how i am losing this battle.

it has been over 3 years now since i woke up about watchtower.

the battle that i am talking about is the tug of war with my wife (i adore her immensely), watchtower is winning, she simply will not give in to my so-called negative thoughts about the religion that we are in.

Wonderment

It is very likely that no matter how much you try to convince her out of the WT religion, she will stay put. Leave her alone. Let her worship the way she thinks is right. As long as she doesn't force you to go along, you both will be better off.

When someone is fully convinced of something, such one will likely not let go unless something drastic happens in their life. When you least expected, your wife may perhaps go through her own bad experience with someone there, or with a drastic change the Society implements, making her rethink her allegiance. Time also can do what you may not. People often do change with the passing of time.

Best wishes to you!